


the darkness carried you home to me

by ruthlesslistener



Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [2]
Category: Hollow Knight (Video Games)
Genre: Bad Things Happen Bingo, Canon-Typical Child Death, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Explicit Gore, Eye Trauma, Family Reunions, Gen, Implied Unethical Magic Experimentation, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Lots of pus/gore/gross shit, Nonverbal Communication, Pale King (background), Post-Canon, Post-Dream No More Ending (Hollow Knight), Pseudoscience, Sibling Relationship, The Radiance attempted to use Hollow as a cocoon theory, hornet stop threatening random civilians challenge, now with art!!, painful wound cleaning, thank you friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:21:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22359415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruthlesslistener/pseuds/ruthlesslistener
Summary: Bad Things Happen Bingo Prompt Two: Painful Wound CleaningWhen Hornet offered to help Little Ghost fight the Hollow Knight, she fully expected to kill them. Once the Infection got a hold on a bug, there was no surviving it. There was nothing that you could do for the fallen, except grant them a mercy of a swift death and pray to whatever gods listening that they did not suffer in excess on the way out. She had long since accepted that her siblings would die, and thought herself ready when the time came and the Old Light fell to the void.But the Pale King would not let his Pure Vessel die so easily, and in the aftermath of the battle, she finds her elder sibling still alive, still breathing. If only keeping them that way would be so easy.
Relationships: The Hollow Knight | Pure Vessel & Hornet
Series: Bad Things Happen Bingo [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1531121
Comments: 43
Kudos: 235
Collections: Bad Things Happen Bingo





	the darkness carried you home to me

**Author's Note:**

> UPDATE!!! NOW WITH ART!!! This was done by skyedragondraws (tumblr url), go check out their other works because hELLO THEIR STYLE IS GORGEOUS AAA
> 
> Okay before you read this please be warned that there's some graphic depictions of pus, infection, eye horror, etc in here. Probably not as intense as I could have gone but still really, really gross. And while I didn't tag emetophobia bc Hollow doesn't throw up, per se, there are a couple scenes where they cough Infection up out of their lungs that can be read as such. Oh, and also, I'm using the theory that the Infection was the Radiance attempting to physically reform in other insects, primarily using Hollow as a cocoon, so...yeah you can probably see where this is going. 
> 
> Also, the medical procedures in here are probably complete bullshit, but when your patient is a bunch of void goop approximating organs within a shell of maybe-synthetic chitin, then there's not much you can do other than scoop out the bad bits and pray for the best. Writing this fic kinda drove home my theory that the reason why Hollow survives in the Godmaster endings is bc the coming of the new Shade God replaces the Infection with Void, bc...yeah there should be no way they survive this normally

Hornet had never been much of a waiter.

It had been a quality that Herrah had tried to train out of her when she was a little spiderling, just starting to learn how to weave clumsy webs and focus her soul. Most Weavers in Deepnest were net hunters; meals came to those who waited, and having the patience necessary to painstakingly weave an inescapable trap was always a virtue. All spiders were taught to weave, taught how to best wield their instinct and skill to ensure that they would never go hungry. In Deepnest, it was a matter of life and death as much as it was a cultural symbol.

Hornet was not a weaver.

She preferred a simpler approach to her problems; hunting came naturally to her. She was fleetfooted and quick-thinking, faster and sharper than most other creatures in Hallownest, her aim and skill with her needle lethal. She lay down traps and darted over the ruins faster than the fire-eyed corpses could follow, and that was enough.

Another scream echoed out from within the temple, a pained, unearthly howl that seemed to suck the air from her lungs, the very colour from the earth. She tightened her grip on her needle, took back her breath, and very carefully tried not to think about what was going on in there. The heavy, exhausting gravity of the Void within was enough of a warning. This was not her place. This was not her fight.

She was a creature of action, and this inaction rankled her. The sickly sweet scent of the infection spreading was proof that she wasn’t supposed to linger and yet...her mother died for this. Her father died because of this, though his sins ensured that she did not mourn him. Her siblings suffered, and-

No. They were not living things. The weakening of one support in a bridge did not indicate that the metal had feelings- merely that it had outlived its usage and needed to be replaced. The creature in the temple that wore her father’s face was not, had never _been_ a sibling. Not in the traditional sense. It was dying, as all things did, and it required replacement. Nothing more, nothing less.

All she had to do was wait. Wait, and be patient. The little ghost was strong- she had tested it herself. It should be able to hold its own against the Hollow Knight.

It should-

Another scream sounded, howling with such pain and such anger that the lumaflies crowded together in their lanterns and flickered nervously, and before she had the chance to register just what she was doing, she had readied her needle and thread and darted inside. 

The press of the Void was choking, crushing in around her the second she flew into the temple. White sigils glowing with the Pale King’s familiar light offered some reprieve, but focusing on pulling herself towards the pulsing orange light took all of her willpower, all of her strength. The only thing that she could focus on was her own momentum- the throw of her needle, the tug of her thread as it pulled her along. The muffled thunder of her feet against obsidian as the choking sweet stench overcame her, and the inner door to the Black Egg Temple loomed wide.

The flash of a blade scored through the yellow-orange fog; Little Ghost’s nail, cutting an arc in the air as an explosion of howling shadow overcame them, turning their form black. The screaming wraiths did not knock their pursuer away, as hoped- a longnail nearly twice as long as their entire body swept out of the mists, slamming them to the side with an audible _crack_ that made Hornet wince.

The owner of the nail followed a few seconds later, sickly yellow mists swirling before the shadow shuffling forward. Out of the mire lumbered the so-called Pure Vessel- not the noble, eerily silent sibling she remembered from her earliest of days, but a graceless, shambling husk. Their once-proud stance was gone, the fathomless dark of their eyes replaced with the malignant orange glow of the infection; there was a crack in their mask, she noted, a weakness, and as they raised their nail (to stab Little Ghost, or themselves? There were countless lacerations in their chest, and they did not look like they could have been made by their little sibling’s nail), she flung hers out on a thread and _yanked._

Her needle struck true, the thread linking them shuddering as the tip buried deep in shell. The air around her was hot and muggy; it threatened to choke her as she soared forward, aiming for their horns. The Hollow Knight’s eyes bored into hers, two small orange suns that grew bigger, bigger, bigger, until her foot was braced on their head and she couldn’t see them at all anymore, safe from that lurid, angry stare. Her sibling’s shell blazed like fire under her, like the goddess they contained was clawing up out of their skin, like it would burn her if she lingered. She was still small enough to fit between the span of their horns, just like she had been when they’d sealed her away away, and she dug the tip of her nail deeper within their shell and bound their body tight with thread and tried to forget the fact that she was about to help her long-estranged sibling kill the last of the only family that she had ever known. 

They went down easily. Too easily, and when they fell they bared their throat to the little vessel bleeding out void on the floor before them. There was no way that wasn’t intentional.

“Do it!” she screamed- because she could feel the _thing_ under her sibling’s shell stirring, could feel the tension start to pull on the threads binding them as they fought to keep still. They were sickly and dying, but even a weak god could still kill, and if Little Ghost didn’t finish them now she knows that there would be no way that she could help them again. The void within the temple pressed down on her lungs, settling heavy on her limbs, and the sickly sweet scent of the infection’s rot burned her throat on every breath in. She could feel an angry thrumming in the air, a raging pressure that urged her to remember, to-

_They had always been there everytime she visited the White Palace- a bug who looked just like her, with four limbs and a black body and a white mask with sweeping horns, and she had spent her days avoiding her father’s servants in favor of pulling on the hem of their cloak, hiding behind them, begging them to play with her and teach her to spar and do all the noble grown-up things that her mother and father insisted she simply wasn’t ready for yet. She loved them deeply, her very tall sibling, and she always pretended that their silence was a game that they played on all the other bugs, a game that only she knew the answer to. Learning that was not the case had been a bitter blow._

_When the infection leaked out again, when the White King vanished himself and his palace into the dream realm to die, her ill-placed bitterness had vanished. But in the place where her resentment had flowered yawned loneliness again, and that had been much, much worse._

**_No, don’t think, don’t remember!_ **

From the little vessel’s cloak came a talisman, and from that talisman flickered an ethereal, chiming nail. She had seen that thing before- felt the bite of its blade, knew it did nothing but tickle her mind and fill it with a strange, open warmth- but before she could shout at the vessel to grab their nail, the edge flashed through the Hollow Knight’s mask, and Little Ghost disappeared.

All the tension in her sibling’s body went limp. The Pure Vessel- _no, don’t think of them as such, they weren’t pure, they had been ruined_ \- collapsed like a toy with its strings cut, and she went down with them, tumbling over their horns to sprawl painfully under the never-ending pressure of the void. Weakly, she lifted her head to look at them; her needle had been dislodged when she fell, the coil of silk on its handle still bound tightly to her wrist. She could see the ruin it had left in their mask; a whole chip of it gone, new cracks radiating out from where her needle struck, leaking dark bubbles of void out into the already-saturated air. She stared at them, insides a churning mess of emotions, but they made no move to get up. The horrible wet rattle of their breaths made itself known in the resulting silence, loud over the pulse of the infection’s heartbeat, their blinding orange eyes staring at nothing as they lay broken on the floor. 

No.

They were staring at her.

Her stomach flipped, her hand instinctively reaching towards where her nail lay on the ground before them, and they _followed_ the motion, the lurid orange in their eyes swirling as they tracked her. Apart from just looking terrifying, it was also really, really bad news for her- she couldn’t muster the energy to get up, and their nail was still held tight in their grip. They hadn’t the weakness to void that she did, cursed as they were, and even though they were weakened and dying it would still take only a casual swing from that great weapon to cleave her in two-

She yanked her needle to her side and tried to rise, and they let out a ragged, whistling sigh and fell still.

Somehow, it was that little movement that weakened her.

“Hollow,” she whispers, dropping their title, making it a name, like she did when she was little and thought the world of them. They respond like they used to, tilting their head to better bring her into sight, and with a jolt to her heart, she realized that they were blind in one eye. The crack in their mask must have extended further down than she thought, if they were angling their head so. 

What could she say? She had thought herself done with them ages ago, centuries ago, when their father locked them in the temple and trapped her mother in the dream, leaving her practically an orphan. The lack of their presence had haunted her more than she could put to words- after all, how could you mourn someone who was never a person in the first place? How could you miss someone whose personality was all in your head? Herrah, at least, she could grieve for without feeling foolish. Her mother was gone; there was no way to undo the seals without destroying her, and if the Pale King knew how to undo the enchantment then he’d taken the secret to his grave. But the Hollow Knight? The Pure Vessel? They had been a sacrifice from the beginning. Whatever affection she had had for them had all been the foolish projection of a lonely little girl who had latched onto the first thing that had looked like her, a living statue that she had called sibling.

But the Infection…

She staggered to her feet- to end them,to steel her nerve, she had no idea- but before she could make more than one stumbling step towards them, their eyes went dark, mask cracking open. Their shade streamed out of their body in a rush of void that knocked her back, glaring scars of light gleaming along their form, shining bright out from their cold, glowing eyes.

The sheer size of it frightened her; their shade was nothing like the hostile shadows of the hatchlings in the abyss, little grasping things who only caused harm when their little clinging fingers dug into her soul for warmth. This loomed over her, sucked her into their gravity. She gripped her needle tight, stared back into those empty, yellow eyes, and prepared for battle. But the shade of her sibling made no move to attack her- instead, it tipped its head to the ground and condensed itself into a ball of darkness, swirling down, down, down into the reflectionless dark obsidian.

...No. That wasn’t the temple’s floor anymore. That was void, bubbling out thick from the cracks left unsealed by the Pale King’s magic. 

And it was rising **.**

She staggered back, heartbeat pounding loud in her ears, but she didn’t make more than two steps towards the entrance before the void seeping out of the ground burst out in a wriggling, seething mass, angry and grasping and _alive, alive, alive_ **,** and she was swallowed whole under its heaving tide.

* * *

When she awakens, the temple is destroyed. There is a pit in the ground where she and Hollow fell, still permeated with the biting chill of void, but her breaths come easily enough and her fingers curl when she wants them too. She tries to look inwards, to sense her soul the way her father tried to teach her, but exhaustion drags at her mind and she can’t focus. She can’t _feel_ anything different about it though, so she doesn’t think that any of the void lingered in her. 

When she turns her head to check where Hollow’s body went, she’s greeted by the sight of Ghost’s broken mask.

Somehow, even after expecting to lead them to their death, the sight of their empty mask stuns her. For a long, painful moment, she could do nothing but sit silently and stare at it, thoughts numb to everything but the sight of their empty eye sockets, their tilted little horns. It’s so painfully, fundamentally _wrong_ in a way that she can’t explain, doesn’t want to try to explain. The little wanderer she watched all across the kingdom was gone. She would never see them again, nevermore feel the clash of their blade on hers, and the knowledge of that absence stuns her.

Their things were strewn about, nail buried in a crack in the floor. Numbly, she picked up their little belt, the box containing the rest of their charms clipped to its latch, map and quill folded away neatly under the lid. All their charms were kept in meticulous order, lined up clean and neat in their individual spaces- some looked cleaner than others, more well-worn, favoritism shining clear among the span of them. The pins for their map were kept in ordered bundles along the corners of their charm box, piercing through a spare piece of parchment. Just looking at their possessions made something in her thorax start to ache terribly, so she shoved them all into a pocket in her cloak, telling herself that she’d look at them later. Sometime when she couldn’t see their shattered mask staring at her from the edges of her vision, when touching their things didn’t feel like a sacrament. 

From the back of the temple, lost somewhere in the shadow and the rubble, something _wheezes._

She’s been a resident of Deepnest too long to linger in mourning when there’s danger about and she’s up on her feet with her needle ready to be thrown in seconds. Little Ghost’s remains go ignored for the moment as she scrambles awkwardly over rubble, needle held high, ready to fight whatever monster the deep dragged up.

She finds only her elder sibling, moving in weak, unsettling jerks as the cysts in their exoskeleton burst open. That alone would not be particularly alarming; the bodies of the severely infected burst when they grew too mangled to function anymore, anyone who’d traveled into Hallownest knew this. The problem, then, was that The Hollow Knight’s shade had apparently attempted to re-fuse with their body; or it had made the mistake of getting itself trapped in the magical bonds their father had put on them to prevent them from leaving in the first place. She knows this because she can see the seal of binding placed on their mask flaring bright as it pressed the void threatening to swell out of their eye sockets back in where it belonged, which subsequently meant that they were _still conscious_ and _alive_ when the thin membranes holding the infection burst and leaked their pseudo-guts out all over the floor. 

It’s disgusting. It’s horrifying. It signals an end to the infection, an end to all of the sacrifices that her father made in vain, but she couldn’t think of their bitter victory with her sibling’s breath rattling wet and heavy, their remaining hand clawing at the floor in agony. She could only push herself forward to stand by their side, crouching by their mask as she wordlessly starts spinning bandages over her fingers to bind their wounds in silk. 

She doesn’t know why she’s doing this. It’s clear to anyone with eyes that the Hollow Knight is in their death throes. It would be more prudent to use this silk to bind her own wounds instead, ensure that she lived to see the peace that Little Ghost won with their sacrifice. It would be far kinder to stick her needle through the crack in their mask and break them, to shatter their shell so completely that their shade could no longer be bound to a body so torn apart with the wounds of the war that they had been born for. 

She hoped-

_Do not hope._

The silk binds around Hollow’s body with a flash. It’s clumsy and unpracticed (she had no one left to practice on), but it does the trick. The flow of fluids stop, only the faintest hint of orange and black seeping through the pale silver-white silk. Hollow shivers, a full-body tremor wracking them, and the void feathering out of their mask’s eye holes stops straining to be freed long enough for the seals of binding to dissolve away.

Hornet hovered awkwardly by their side, pressing a hand against the sweep of one broad horn (she had wished to have horns that big, once, though she stopped when she started fighting and watched how much Hollow struggled to keep their head up), and tried hard to think about what to do next past the steadily-growing fog in her mind. There was a hot springs deeper in the crossroads, though she had no idea if they could survive the trip down...Dirtmouth was just above, though devoid of residents who could help with a creature of void. But making the trip might be worth it anyways, maybe she could find some medical equipment there...maybe the grubfather- 

Their last, wheezing breaths go silent. Something cold settles in the pit of Hornet’s stomach ( _don’t think, don’t think_ ), and with an empty heart she turns away and began to walk towards the exit.

And then the coughing starts.

It’s a horrible, wet, wheezing noise, air hissing out from the ragged remnants of what they use for lungs as they struggle to clear the infection from their chest, as black-tinged orange sludge bubbles out from their throat and they struggle to rise and breathe again. Weakly, they paw at the point of their mask, helpless as a hatchling, and she rushes over to help them, turning away from the sickly sweet scent of rot rising from the orange bile. She can’t even _see_ where it’s all coming from, void blending into void, and if she weren’t so terrified then she’d probably be more curious but for now the cold feeling in her stomach has risen into her throat and there’s pus and void leaking through their bandages and if she doesn’t stop them now then they’re going to tear something vital and they’re going to die, _really_ going to die, and then she will be all alone again. 

_(Don’t think, don’t_ **_think_ ** _)_

“Hollow,” she says, and even under all her fear she hates the way she sounds, wobbly and fragile like a little grub again. The ragged edges of their heaving chest pushes into her side, hot and cold swirling though them like the abyss within was trying to cancel out the infection swirling in their core. The black spotting the chunks of orange they were coughing up was starting to get thicker, cold dribbles of void stringing down from the opening under their mask, and dammit, _dammit_ she could do _nothing._ “Hollow, you have to stop. _Try_ to stop. If you keep going you’ll just make everything worse, _please_ stop. **_Hollow_** _!_ ”

They tilt their head to look at her, trembling all over as they struggled to obey her instructions, and suddenly, horribly, she’s reminded of all the times when she was little and she’d pretend that she knew what they were thinking, when she’d lie on her belly and force them to do the same, her curious dark eyes staring deep into theirs as she made up stories and spun tales about all the hidden drama and fun they got into when she was away, by the right of being her very large and impressive older sibling. The Pale King and the retainers had dragged her away everytime they caught her at it, trying to gently tell her why that wasn’t the case, but she’d kept at it for ages before it finally sank in, before she finally listened. The betrayal she’d felt when she’d realized they never really cared had been insurmountable...but it made their sealing a little easier to handle, however cruel it seemed to be. She had told herself that, when the time came. Vessels did not feel. Vessels did not think. Their only drive in life was to obey the will of the Pale King, and if they were flawed in any way it was better to end their misery swiftly than to let them stumble blindly on to a fate that they’d never come back from. 

But Hollow wasn’t pure. They’d never been pure. They had chosen this for themselves, and the faint emotion she imagined that she caught flickering in the void of their one good eye was not quite fear, but something softer. Instinctual terror, mixed with dull, resigned acceptance. The look prey gave her when it was bleeding out on the tip of her needle, and they finally realized that their darkness coming to claim them was inevitable.

She wouldn’t let that happen to them. Maybe a few moments ago, yes. But there was adrenaline coursing through her veins now when before there had been only numb shock, and she would rather let the Void take her before she forced herself to sit here and watch them die. Not when she knew there was a better option. 

“Come. We need to get you help.” Her voice is still trembling, but when she finds her footing and pushes up under their chest, her resolve holds firm. Hollow is lighter than they look (lighter than they should be, she thinks grimly), but they’re still much larger and lankier than her, and weak from their wounds. They lurch heavily into their side with a pained, feeble wheeze that makes her own chest tighten with sympathy. “I know. But there’s no one above to help us and I-”

They lurched again, clutching her tight enough that their claws sink into her side, and she winces and shivers as the unique feeling of her soul being drained hollows out her chest. She doesn’t even know how they _get_ any- she thought herself drained past capacity- but they focus and heal themselves just enough for their shivering to calm, the weight threatening to crush her down easing slightly as they get their feet under them. It’s enough of a help that she can’t even be mad at them for draining her, the apologetic tilt of their head mollifying her.

“I forgive you. But try to wait,” she hisses, pushing them both into a standing position, “until we get you to a spring. There’s plenty of soul there for you to heal with, and the water has medicinal properties. Please.”

They rasped out another breath, but make no move to protest as she begin to clumsily help them walk towards the temple exit.

It’s agony. She is already weakened from the void onslaught earlier, and Hollow’s weight being lighter than it should does not detract from the fact that they are still much heavier and larger than she is. Each step forward into the dark is a clumsy stumble that threatens to tip them both into the rock, and each horrible wet rasp of breath Hollow takes is a harsh reminder that they can’t afford to risk a fall. She falls into a trance of sorts by the time that they’re halfway out the temple, roused only by the shuffling scrape of other bug’s feet when she finally gets them into the crossroads proper.

Huh. Would you look at that. Some of the infected husks hadn’t been dead after all.

Several disoriented bugs stumble about the Crossroads, oozing infection leaking from the burst cysts and cracks in their carapace. Several more knelt by the side of the road or lay weakly against the rubble, and many more huddle in their death throes, but there were enough living and whole to turn and stare at them. Enough for their concerned mumbling to lapse into fearful silence when they saw just who she was carrying.

“What are you staring at?” She barked, and both Hollow and the bugs staring at her jerked to attention at the tone of her voice. She couldn’t think to tone it down, all her focus on her burden and the urgency of getting to a spring. “Help us!”

And they came. Many hang back, too afraid or injured to approach, but three of the able-bodied came to her aid, helping to prop Hollow up, despite the clear misgiving in their eyes. Hollow paid them no attention whatsoever, not even flinching when one pressed up on their blind side, but the added help startled her so much that for a second, all she could do was stare numbly at the other buds as they stumbled their way down to the springs.

“Where to?” One finally asked, craning his head around Hollow’s horns to look at her. His voice rasped in his throat, infection crusting his mouthparts, but his eyes are keen and clear as they look at her. Little Ghost’s sacrifice hadn’t been for nothing. “I don’t think we can take this one up the well.”

“To the springs,” She replies shortly, and ignored the startled look they give her in reply. She had forgotten that most bugs could not make use of the ample soul filling their waters, seeing them only as luxury shell care, but perhaps that was a good thing- if the true extent of their medicinal qualities went unknown, then she would have more room to care for her sibling. “I need to cleanse their wounds. There are no living bugs in Hallownest that can treat them right now. The village will offer no aid.”

“As you say, my lady,” the curious bug replied, and went silent. He said little else for the rest of the trip, and she in turn had little chance to think about what they said, all her thoughts focused on keeping her sibling steady as they climbed deeper into the crossroads.

Just before they reached the hot springs, Hollow went still again. 

“Fuck. Lower them. Now!” She reacted faster this time, twisting around and dropping to her knees as the shuddering whistle built up in Hollow’s chest. The helpful wanderers caught on quickly, lowering them down and backing away to a safe distance as their head dipped down and they started coughing again, acidic yellow-orange mist accompanying every breath out. She backed away a little, tipping her mask back away from the rotting smell, and pressed her hand against one of the few uninjured sections of their back. Their shell, at least, was starting to cool back to their usual temperature with every bit of infection dispelled- though that was hardly comforting when every breath they took gurgled in their chest like it would be their last.

 _Hang on just a little longer, please,_ **_please._ **

They didn’t stop until, with a sickeningly wet sound, they expelled what looked like a massive wing scale from their chest, their breaths instantly coming easier as soon as it was out. Hornet’s stomach lurched, and she reached out with her nail and spread it open, revealing a golden, ominous shimmer. From behind her, she heard one of the bugs gasp fearfully, giving voice to the emotion she refused to let show. 

“She was trying to reform within you,” she muttered, horrified. Her stomach lurched again, and if she hadn’t fasted before the battle then she was sure that she would have thrown up her lunch by now. “Fucking wyrms, Hollow, she tried to make you her _cocoon_.”

Hollow coughed pitifully, trembling as they leaned into her side. They had dispelled more of the infection burning them up from the inside, but that meant little when all it did was exacerbate their wounds; they were already weak enough. With a curse, she waved her helpers back over, staggering to her feet. They came quickly, grimacing in pity and horror, and, with one last final heave of effort, the four of them managed to drag Hollow into the hot springs.

There were two large bugs in there already, conversing about the spread and fall of the infection in low, scandalized tones. By the quality of their masks, they were once very high-class bugs in this particular region of Hallownest; bankers perhaps, or heads of the mining guilds. They took one look at Hollow looming at the entrance of the hot springs and stiffened with terror, but they didn’t stop their whispering until Hornet marched over to the edge of the springs and pulled her needle on them. 

“You two. Out.” She put her best authoritative growl into her voice, and tilted her weapon so that it shone a keen, bright light back at them. She had little interest for the games of the high class, and refused to cater to their whims. “We require the usage of these waters.”

“This spring is occupied,” replied the smaller of the two, though not without giving her needle a nervous glance. “Go find another.” 

“Do we look like we can make the trip to another spring? Do they look like they can wait for you to polish your shell and trim your claws?” Blind, desperate fury wrested her control from her grasp, and her voice took on an angry buzz that made everyone listening flinch back. Angrily, she gestured between Hollow and the nobles with her needle, stepping forward so that her foot was braced on the rim of the spring. One lunge, and she’d be able to pierce the taller bug through the heart. Maybe, if she was quick, she could get them both. “This bug has done more for Hallownest than you could manage if you worked every day of your life to the end of our world. If they die here for the sake of your comfort, the deaths of you, your mate, and your brood would barely be enough to pay back for one scale off their carapace. Get. Out.”

The larger bug squeaked, and scrambled out of the tub, splashing water as they went. The smaller one staggered back, out of the perceived range of her nail (how wrong they were!), and tried to muster what little scraps of their dignity they had left. 

“And what authority do you possess, to think you have the right to threaten us so?” Their voice warbled with terror, but they were still holding fast and _still in the way of the waterfalls she needed to use, godsdamn it._ “I am hardly going to allow you to insult me, not if you are-”

“I am Hornet, protector of Hallownest and daughter of the Beast of Deepnest.” Her needle cut a circle through the air as she gestured for her helpers to bring Hollow closer- they couldn’t afford to wait. Then she hopped into the water and began to slowly stalk closer to the offending bug, raising her weapon in preparation to strike. “Heed my warning, or die.”

That was all the noble needed to leave. They scrambled to get out of the spring on time, eyes nearly popping out of their mask, and Hornet sheathed her needle and turned to help lower Hollow down into the waters of the spring, grunting with effort as their weight listed back onto her. Carefully, she dragged them over to the waterfall, using the buoyancy of the water to dispel some of their weight, and propped them up so that they knelt near the edge of the spring, sagging against the rock wall with their infected shoulder turned outwards.

“Ma’am? Is there anything we can do?” The curious bug from earlier knelt down at the edge of the spring, cautious but concerned. The others nod along with them, gesturing their assent; she hadn’t realized they were mute. She’d probably feel bad about that later. “Any help we can offer?”

“Leave this room, and let me tend to my sibling in peace. You’ve done enough, and what comes next isn’t going to be pretty.” She didn’t realize she called Hollow her sibling until the words were already out of her mouth, but whatever. The fleeing bugs would talk enough about the strange leviathan of the temple already. Soon everyone in the damn ruins would have heard about how she threatened someone at needlepoint for the sake of a glorified hot tub, she was sure. 

Then a thought occurred to her, and she cursed herself for her negligence. “If you really wish to provide more aid, then try to find someone above that knows anything about healing, or the final plan to stop the fall of Hallownest. _Anyone_. I know I said that a healer wouldn’t help them, but I need more hands than I have, hopefully from someone who won’t fumble or hesitate at what I wish to do.”

She expected more questions, but they didn’t come. Instead, the stranger nodded his assent and sketched a wobbly bow, as if she wasn’t just someone who’d threatened to kill an entire bug’s family if her needs weren’t met. “As you wish, milady.”

Then he gestured to his partners, and they were gone, filing out of the hot springs with nary a word or sign of complaint. Hornet waited thirty seconds, tense, but she couldn’t hear anyone approaching or over the roar of the water. 

“Alright,” she muttered, half to steel herself, and turned back to her fragile half-sibling. They’d listed further to the side than she’d like them to, pressing their face against the unsympathetic rock, though they straightened groggily when she tugged on them. “They’re gone. Now, Hollow, I need you to focus.”

They swayed their head down to look at her, woozy and unseeing and generally making no effort to focus soul. She hated, _hated_ commanding them, but…

“Vessel.” They perked instantly at her voice this time, coming alert despite their exhaustion and pain. She couldn’t tell whether she’d rather punch her father for conditioning them as such, or if she wanted to hug him for ensuring their compliance. “I need you to focus your soul and attempt to heal. These hot springs are an unlimited reservoir to suit your needs.”

And then, because just standing next to them made her feel like a little girl again, as if the years stretching between them were all just a bad dream, she whispered “Please.”

They sluggishly tipped their head at her, the void within their good eye flickering. For a moment, she thought that they hadn’t heard her; or worse, that the Old Light had damaged their mind beyond repair. But then they bent their head forward and tensed their shoulders, the pale white mist of soul condensing on their carapace, and she felt the worried knot in her chest loosen a bit. If they were able to heal themselves like Little Ghost did, then surviving their wounds would just be a matter of trying to refill the void that they lost. And there were plenty of tiktiks that could be hunted to-

The soul they’d been gathering around themselves condensed into the familiar white lines of an offensive spell. She shouted in alarm and leaped back, but it went off before she could make it far enough, cracking her mask and throwing her backwards into the spring. Similar, smaller explosions went off all around her, spraying hot water high in the air and turning the once-peaceful pools into a hazard area. It was fortunate that she had cleared out the spring; Hollow was weakened, significantly so, but their spells still packed enough firepower to kill a normal bug in one blow. 

She stood back up and shook her horns dry, wincing as the warm, itchy sensation of the spring’s magical healing swept over the cracks in her mask. As the water cleared from her ears, she was greeted by the sound of Hollow’s distressed wheezing, the wet, rasping whistle louder than it had been and no less disturbing. 

“Calm down, I’m fine.” Her cloak wasn’t, thoroughly soaked through and heavy, but it needed a cleaning anyways. She was more concerned with that telltale whistle; if they weren’t able to get rid of it with soul magic, then something probably didn’t heal right. “But I told you to _heal,_ not use offensive magic.”

Was that remorse in the subtle tip of their head, or was it exhaustion? Either way, it didn’t matter; whatever strange emotions they hid past their mask could be dealt with later. For now, she was more focused on clearing the remnants of infection from their chest. Vessels didn’t audibly breathe unless they were on the cusp of death, and if they went and died on her after she went through the effort of dragging them down her, then she’d…

...She didn’t know what she’d do.

“Turn around and brace yourself on the edge of the spring. I need to get your thorax cleaned out.” She flipped her wet cloak up to her elbows, freeing her hands. Hollow moved slowly and painfully, but they managed to settle without her helping much, which gave her a little bit of hope. 

Hope that was swiftly quenched as soon as she pulled away the bandages. Hollow’s back was a mess of torn chitin and weeping, burst cysts, perforating their back with divots and holes where their void had been replaced with sunlight. She didn’t know how they still breathed- she didn’t know how they _survived_ with their body torn apart so, only the thinnest stretch of torn skin keeping the shifting void within them from spilling out. She could only assume that the cysts had been closed off from the rest of their internal organs (or whatever constituted as such, given their nature), preventing the acid within from burning them up. But that had been compromised when their nail had lanced through their chest, and now infection was seeping back into their thorax, burning their lungs...and everything else.

Which meant that she had to drain it out. 

“This is going to hurt,” she warned- half to give them time to brace themselves, half to steel herself. Her stomach was churning, throat tightening everytime she looked at the mess the Old Light had made of them. If her head wasn’t floating off in that distant, clinical haze that she went into whenever she was stressed, then she probably would have lost her nerve by now.

Hollow made no move to react. If it wasn’t for the fact that she could see them breathing, air bubbling up through the fluids under their skin, then she’d have thought they died. They certainly looked it.

And they’d die for certain if she did nothing. She wrapped her fingers in silk, trying her best not to think about what she was about to do, and pressed down hard on either side of one of the pockets. Infection bubbled out, showing her where their skin had split, and she grabbed her needle from where it lay in the spring and carefully sliced a wider hole, fashioning another pad of silk to mop it up. She splashed spring water in after every gout of infection she removed, until they finally bled pure black, then patched it up again and moved to the next wound. Her head buzzed from excessive silk use, but the soul in the waters was ever-plentiful, so she didn’t stop, discarding her wraps whenever they soaked through with orange, acidic pus.

Hollow stayed as still as a stone through their treatment, the only indication of their pain a slight quivering in their limbs everytime she drained a cyst. They didn’t move until she tried to clean one of the bigger lacerations in their back; she poured spring water over one of the wounds made by their nail, and they thrashed violently, one of their horns slamming into her side and knocking her down as their head arched back. Their coughing started again, gurgling and horrible, though she saw what had caused it when the liquid they expelled from their lungs ran nearly clear rather than the horrible thick orange-black mix they had choked on earlier.

“Sorry! I’m sorry.” She staggered back to her feet and sloshed over to help hold them still, the aching in her side going unheeded. Foolish, she was a foolish fucking _idiot;_ their nail had pierced them all the way through, of _course_ the water would have gone into their lungs. “I didn’t- I wasn’t thinking.”

Their trembling didn’t subside, but they turned their head and knocked their horns gently against hers, nuzzling softly against her cheek. They knew. They forgave her. And they were sorry too, for hurting her on accident. She didn’t know how she knew that, only that she did, in a deep, profound way that defied reason or understanding.

“Just...if it gets to be too much, tap me on the arm, okay?” She tried for gentle, but it came out flat. She had spent too much time fixing her problems by sticking her needle through them to bother with an illusion of friendliness, and now she sounded so much like the Pale King that she wanted to slap herself. “If you pass out because you don’t want to tell me that I’m doing something wrong, I’m going to assume that you died. Again.”

Still too cold for her liking, but Hollow tapped their cheek against hers again, so she assumed that they knew she was trying to help. She sighed, keeping her mask pressed to theirs for a moment, and then sloshed back to the ruin of their back to continue trying to tend to their injuries. Their resilience thus far astounded her, but that was by no means a guarantee for their future survival. 

The stab wounds still needed cleaning, but she decided to deal with them later, packing on bandage compresses to try to help passively drain the liquid from their lungs. Hollow’s shaking didn’t cease, the trembling wracking them growing stronger as she pressed her talons on either side of one of their larger cysts, where their wing covers had been before the infection chewed through them. There was something firm and hot under her claws, noticeable even under what hard plating they still had left. 

“Hollow?” Their head jerked towards her voice, claws twitching in towards their palm, but they didn’t reach for her. She kept her touches light, just to be safe, but when she moved one hand to their other shoulder, she didn’t feel the same tension. Either there was another cyst caught under their carapace, where their wings used to be, or...she thought of the mothwing fragment they had coughed up, and doused her needle under the waterfall to prepare for what she had to do. She wished that she had thought to bring some of her throwing knives, longing for the precision of their narrower tips. “There’s something in your back. I’m probably going to have to cut it out.” She cleared her throat, trying to keep her voice steady; she needed to sound professional and confident, not like she was dreading what she’d find in their flesh. “If it gets too much for you, if you even feel for a little bit like you’re about to pass out, I need you to tell me. I don’t know how deep it goes, and if you’re too weak for me to take it out then I’d rather not learn from you dying on me.”

They lay quietly for a moment, then reached back and lightly pressed the tip of two of their longest claws to her wrist. An affirmative, similar to the little signs they would use with her when she was little, one that would have gone unknown and unlooked for in the White Palace. She had taught them a whole language of signals to use with her during play, based loosely off the sign language she had picked up in the capital and Deepnest, and their use of one made her breath catch in her throat. Two claws to the wrist, a sign of trust and fealty. They swore to her that they would follow her lead, that they trusted her to do what was right.

She hadn’t thought that they would remember them. Everytime she looked back into her memories she had thought she found more proof of them being detached in their playtime with her, too busy being an empty, cursed pawn to pay full attention to her. Somehow, knowing that they remembered made her dread far worse, the cost of a mistake higher. It was getting harder and harder to be detached with them

She reached over and returned the gesture, laying her palm in theirs for a brief moment to steady herself. Then she took a deep breath, placed the tip of her needle against their back, and sliced. 

The Infection burst out in a rush of clumpy orange goo, dribbling slowly away when she carefully splashed some water on the edges of the incision. Hollow grunted in pain, audible only from the wet whistle of goop in their chest, and she paused for a moment to give them time to recover, eyeing the glimmer of orange as she lightly pressed on the edges of the cut. The Infection seemed thicker here, more condensed, though when she swiped through it with a silk-covered claw, she met nothing thicker than gelatinous slime. Maybe it was deeper, or there was nothing in their back after all. She certainly hoped that that was the case.

Hollow had given her no sign to stop, so she continued on, carefully scooping concentrated blobs of orange out of their back until Void started bleeding through again, dark flesh exposed to the healing mist of the springs. They gave no indication of their pain other than the occasional heavy wheeze of breath; bitterly, she wished that she had thought to bring along her pain medications, wished she knew if they would even work on them. Their void nature never seemed so much like a cruelty as it did right now, when they had no voice to cry out their pain, no certain method of pain relief. The only boon it granted was a fast healing rate and an endurance that outlasted even that of other gods, but that meant little when it forced them to stay conscious through such agony.

Halfway though cleaning out the wound, her claws scraped into something solid, something covered in a thicker layer of infection than the rest. Her breath caught in her chest, and she carefully felt around the girth of it to ensure her suspicious- too thick to be the remnants of their wings, free-moving when she tried to grasp at it. Most certainly a foreign object, wedged tight under protective layers of infection, pieces of glimmering gold sticking to her claws when she drew them out to look.

“Hollow, I’ve found it.” She didn’t often thank her father for anything, but his ability to draw all the emotion out of his voice came in handy now. She didn’t want Hollow to know how shaky she was. “I’m about to take it out. Brace yourself.” 

No verbal response, but their talons twitched at the sound of her voice, indicating to her that they were still alive. She couldn’t tell if they were fully conscious anymore, but that would be a blessing at this point. If not, she hoped that they at least had found some far off, distant corner of their mind to hide in and ignore the pain, because there was no avoiding this part of the process.

She tore the goop-covered wrappings on her claws and respun another cover, grateful for the endless Soul provided by the springs. Then, as carefully as she could, she pressed open the incision and slipped her claws in, grasping through cold, slick void until the thick heat of the infection seeped through her silk up to her wrist. 

This time, the hard object stuck in their flesh was easier to find, and she managed to get her claws around it without aggravating them too much. She shifted her fingers to affirm that she got a good grip on it, then slowly slid it out, worried it might be hooked around something vital. All the breath left Hollow’s lungs, in one hissing rush of air, but she managed to get the entire thing out without needing a second attempt, a plug of solidified infection coming loose with it. She carefully splashed some spring water in the dregs left, heartened by the rush of void filling in the empty space, then dunked the object into the spring, watching with mute horror as the clumps of Infection clinging to it washed away.

It was a leg. Not quite fully formed, dissolving away into clumps of violently orange-yellow goo, but still. A leg. A leg with pale gold feathers still attached to it, glimmering out from the infected clots like a mockery of all things good and holy. The Old Light really _had_ been trying to reform within Hollow, using them as a cocoon, and her nausea rose to a nearly unbearable point before she managed to get it back under control again with some very deep breathing.

She had to keep it together. She could not puke in the spring, tempting though it may be. The Old Light was dead, killed by Little Ghost, and not actively a threat to Hollow anymore, but they weren’t out of the woods yet. She had to help them, before they bled out, or something worse happened with the remaining Infection still stuck in their body. She was a warrior of Deepnest, she had seen her fair share of gore and parasites. She couldn’t afford to back out now.

“It’s out, Hollow.” This time, her voice wavered a little more than she wished it to, her calm facade breaking a little bit. She took another deep breath in, tossing the leg further downstream, and continued on with cleaning and rewrapping her hands. Rinse, repeat. Draw the light and life from the energy-rich waters around her, spin it into thread, bind it around herself so that she didn’t make their wounds worse or get burned. Splash the spring water into the gaping cysts to clean them, be careful not to get any into the nail wounds in their back. Try not to think about how impossible it was that they were still alive, their title fitting them again in a new, painful way. “I want you to try to focus again. To heal, please, not blow me into oblivion.”

Her joke ended up sounding more like a rebuke. Hollow didn’t move. She frowned, and reached out to lightly prod their shoulder, in one of the few areas where their plating was still intact. They were still breathing, the painful whistle in their chest diminished some, but they seemed to be too weak to lift their head, or too zoned out to hear her. Maybe if she mimicked her father again? “Hollow Knight. I am speaking to you.”

 _That_ got a reaction, her half-sibling groggily trying to snap back to attention at the sound of her voice. She kept her palm pressed against their shoulder, keeping them steady, then pointed at the spring water when they wearily turned their head to look at her. The wounded eye was weeping black tears, dripping down to the stone rim of the springs; she’d have to get them something to eat soon. They needed to replenish their void, they were losing far too much of it. “Focus again. Healing magic this time, please.”

They dipped their head back down, resting the point of their mask on the edge of the pool, and focused, white motes of soul misting around their shell again. She lifted her hand up off their back and sloshed a safe distance away, just in case, but this time the heal went off without fanfare.The ambient void motes rising in the air disappeared, the whistle in their chest losing its wet quality, and Hornet felt a cool wave of relief wash through her. When she sloshed back to their side, she found the cysts on their back had closed over, a new layer of soft, velvety skin stretched between the ruined plating. The nail wounds were still a ruined mess of shattered carapace and torn skin, but they were no longer bleeding void, and there were shards of broken shell and moth feathers rimming the edges of the punctures where the healing spell had pushed out the foreign objects. 

“Good. Very good.” She didn’t know if the praise would help them, with them so clearly out of it, but they way they relaxed was worth it. She unbound her hands again, shaking them out under the waterfall to rid herself of the last of the acid, then, curiously, reached out and touched the new layer of skin. It was as soft and velvety cool as Little Ghost’s had been, and just as delicate; they twitched away from her on instinct, and she yanked her hand back, worried she’d claw them and reopen the wounds on accident. Not that they’d bleed too much if it happened- she hadn’t felt anything under it. Soul could not regenerate the void that had been lost. “Try it again.”

They did, focusing for twice as long this time, and the nail punctures healed over, messy scabbing healing over to scars. She frowned at the healing difference between the nail punctures and drained cysts, but decided not to ask them about it just yet. That could wait for later, once they regenerated enough void to function again. 

“Stay here and don’t move. I’m going off to hunt. Feel free to lower yourself into the water, but be slow about it. Too much movement will undo all our hard work.” She joined them on the edge of the spring and hopped out, shaking herself off and flicking her needle dry; they flinched away from the shower of droplets, a thin film flickering under the mask of their good eye. The other was still dripping black goo, albeit at a slower pace than usual. Focusing couldn't fix everything- she’d look at it when she came back. 

She took a moment to wring out the edge of her cloak, water sluicing over her hands, and in that moment, they reached out to her, their claws curling loosely around her ankle. She dropped her cape to look at them, and they tipped their head up to meet her eyes, their gaze...beseeching? Grateful? Sorrowful? She couldn’t tell.

“What is it?” She knelt down on the edge of the spring, but they didn’t answer her. Instead, they reached up and gently bumped their mask against hers, pressing their foreheads together with a soft exhalation of breath. It was the same thing she used to do to them when she was thanking them or asking for comfort, and she had to swallow hard against the thick tide of emotion rising in her chest at the memory of it. 

“You’re welcome. I...missed you, too.” They were dripping void onto her face, but she paid little heed to it. It would not linger and burn her, not like the angry orange acid of the Infection. Her chest felt tight, too tight to breathe, all the feelings she had shoved down at their sealing resurfacing again. “I’m sorry that it took so long.”

Another sigh. They didn’t raise their hand from the edge of the spring, but she could tell that they wanted to, to hold her like they did when she was small enough for them to pass it off as emotionless. Briefly, she wondered if the reason why all her memories of them being comforting seemed made-up was merely because they had had to stop as she grew older, because there was no way that this was fake.

Well, she wasn’t going to get any affirmations if she didn’t get some more void into them. She let them linger in that pose for a couple more minutes, then pulled away, shaking her head against the strange chill of dissipating void. They watched her pull away, a strange melancholia surrounding them, and then sank back down into the spring, resting their mask on the edge. She saw the film slide over their eye again, black against black, and backed away before they could reach for her again.

“I’ll be back soon,” she whispered, then threw her needle and sailed out of the springs before she could be tempted to stay.

Hunting was...more difficult than anticipated. The Infection had killed many, yes, but it had also preserved the corpses in an edible state until recently, and with the Old Light defeated, the temporary binds against time were quickly rotting away. She darted through the caverns, holding her breath against the stink of decay, and eventually managed to snare two tiktiks and a crawlid, moving in confused, unsettled circles with the force dictating their mind gone. She briefly considered dragging back one of the fresher husks for Hollow, but decided against it- while the residents of Deepnest took no issue feasting on intelligent bugs when necessary, her sibling had been raised in the White Palace, had nearly died trying to save the bugs of Hallownest. There was no way that they were going to eat them, so she tore off an arm and nibbled it on the fly, flesh thankfully clear of Infection. After clearing so much from Hollow’s back, she wasn’t sure if the smell of it would ever leave her, but at least she didn’t have to taste it directly when her venom melted the bug’s flesh into a slurry of similar consistency. 

She didn’t meet anyone on her pass through the Crossroads, and didn’t run into anyone else on her way back to the springs- both a blessing and a curse. She had no desire to talk, but seeing more survivors than corpses would have lifted her spirits a little bit. With a frown, she wiped her needle clean with a pad of silk and strode back into the hot, humid air, a shiver passing over her. She hadn’t even realized that she was cold until she came back.

She didn’t see anything when she first entered the room, the steam obscuring her vision, and for a moment she thought that they had drowned, a drop of ice-cold fear racing down her back. But then Hollow’s head lifted from the waterfall as she came closer, and she could breathe again, watching with relief as they shook their horns dry and rested their chin on the edge of the pool. The void from their blind eye had gone all smudgy and grey from the water, but the streams of liquid running out of their mask sockets didn’t grow darker, so she let it be, sitting down next to them where they could see her. 

“I’m back, and I carry prey. I apologize for the meager hunt, but times are lean and food runs thin. All that I bring, I bring for you.” The familiar hunting-gift words of Deepnest were bittersweet, and never more true than they were now. Hollow couldn’t say the correct words of acceptance, either, but she was sure that her kin wouldn’t hold it against them. They did not choose to be born mute, or to be raised in the White Palace, where bugs held no honour for the sacred rites of the hunt. So she whispered the words for them, muttering them under her breath as she unslung the tiktiks and crawlid from her back, reabsorbing the silk binding them in a flash of white light. No use in wasting soul, even if she was sitting right next to a literally endless source of it. “Come, eat.”

Hollow’s hand grasped the edge, and, with a whistled grunt of effort, they heaved themselves up, streams of hot water running down the ridges of their carapace. She flicked the edges of her cloak out of the way to prevent it from getting soaked again, swallowing down her instinctual complaint. They couldn’t easily move to prevent splashing her, after all, and the last thing that she wanted to do was make them think that they were a burden to her. She was already uncomfortable enough at the prospect of them thinking themselves indebted to her. 

Once they were situated, they lowered their head down to her level and looked at the options laid out before them, but made no move to pick one up. Hornet nearly asked them what was wrong, before biting down hard on her own fangs in realization. Of course they wouldn’t take the prey, they were still gripping the edge of the pool to steady themselves. They had no way of grabbing their food without losing their balance, their body too wounded to allow them to stretch down and grab it in their jaws like some bugs might. 

If she was in their place, she’d nearly die of shame at the inability to feed herself. So, silently, she picked up one of the tiktiks and offered it in one hand, spreading her fingers out where they could see them. And carefully, ever so carefully, they followed her movement, slowly swinging their head down until the bottom of their mask brushed the tiktik, the void under the porcelain unfurling into a tangle of sharp, fanged mandibles, fangs that only barely brushed her as they gingerly picked the smaller bug up off her hand. Their mask covered most of them as they drew back, but Hornet still watched, fascinated, as their fangs crushed through the shell with a sharp, wet _crack,_ more flexible void tendrils drawing it down into their gullet. They reminded her more of their father’s corpse in Kingdom’s Edge than hers, and for a brief moment she wondered what it would be like to hunt if she had been born the same way, if she forsake her venom for a radiating mess of sharp fangs and thorny tangles. She wasn’t surprised they were mute, in any case- even if they weren’t born of void, there was no way they’d be able to speak coherently with those mouthparts. Not unless they had their father’s ability to whisper into the thoughts of other beings.

They took the crawlid the same way, carefully not touching her as she offered it out, but when she offered them the second tiktik, they hesitated. Instead of swallowing it the second they broke through its shell, they wobbled onto their knees and tore off a chunk of it, offering it to her with a hand that trembled with the struggle to keep themselves upright. 

“No, don’t. I got that for you, you’re hardly eating enough as is.” She tried to push their hand away, but they just pushed right back, shoving it up next to her face with a surprising amount of strength. It was in line with the Deepnest tradition of offering back a portion to the hunter, but she was pretty sure that they were just doing it to baby her, scrunching up her chelicerae as she remembered all the times the Pale King had ordered them to make sure she finished her food before she played. They had kept her from running away from her food for _hours._ “Stop trying to feed me.”

They didn’t react, pushing the tiktik back under her face, where they knew her fangs were. She reared her head back and hissed at them, quiet enough for them to know she wasn’t angry at them, long enough for them to know she was serious. “No, Hollow, don’t, I already ate.” 

That mollified them, at least. They stuffed the rest of the tiktik back into their mouth and grabbed the side of the pool again, easing back into the water. She caught a few motes of void drifting up from their chest where they’d pulled at their scabs, and frowned at them, but they paid her no mind. If she didn’t know that they were impure, she would have thought that they had defaulted to their old orders to watch her, even though she had long since outgrown the need for them. 

But it had also been a very long time since she had been around them this long. And it had been even longer since she still thought that they were anything but a heartless automatron. 

She studiously shoved down the guilt tightening her throat and dipped her claws into the spring to clean them, relishing in the warmth of the water and the cool, refreshing tingle of her soul refilling. Then, once Hollow was done crunching their tiktik, she reached up and pulled their face back down to eye level, frowning at the way they offered no resistance to her pushing and prodding. It was helpful to some extent, but now that she had met Little Ghost, had seen the amount of expression that even the most void-touched vessel could show, she couldn’t help but wonder what Hollow would be like if they hadn’t been trained to be so passive. Would they be more expressive, darting around her and flaring their wings like Little Ghost? Or were they naturally quiet and serene, and their seemingly inscrutable nature came simply from bugs assuming they felt nothing, missing out on all their little cues for communication? 

The familiar deep well of resentment for her father’s plan overflowed in her chest, but she didn’t let her hatred bleed into her voice as she calmly explained, “I have to check your eye. If you’re still blind there, then there must be something stuck in it. I will be careful, but you mustn’t flinch, else I might make it worse.”

They didn’t make any gesture of confirmation, but their shoulders lost some of their tension, which she decided to take as an affirmative. Carefully, she tilted their mask back and forth, staring at the cracked eye socket. She could see the start of new chitin at the bottom of the crack, indicating some healing, but there was a big chip missing where her needle had struck them that hadn’t pieced itself back together. She squinted at it, suspicious of its absence, then peered deep into the socket itself. The membrane they used to blink was half-drawn over the void making up their eye, visible only by merit of not swirling like the eye itself, but there was also something glimmering back within the depths of it, something that she would have normally thought to be merely a reflection of the light. 

But void didn’t reflect light. And she knew how vessel shells cracked. Her needle hadn’t struck them at an angle that would have sent any mask chips flying, though she wasn’t quite as certain about what might have happened when she pushed them down and bound them with silk. 

“I think a shard of your mask might be stuck in your eye,” she whispered. “Be very still, I should be able to get it out if you don’t move.” Now that she had seen it, she couldn’t look away from it. All her focus narrowed onto that glimmering piece of chitin, mind already swirling with ideas on how to remove it. If she used the tip of her claws, taking care not to press past the depth of the membrane, then maybe… “Do not be alarmed. I will make it quick.” 

Hollow’s breath puffed against her forearms, startlingly cold in the warm air. She ignored it, holding their face still with one hand as she carefully reached towards their eye with the other. Slow, she just needed to be slow with this. Slow and careful. Such small delicate things required precision and caution, and for a moment she saw herself back in her father’s workshop, his claws curling carefully around hers as he helped her guide a bolt through a small metal wing, showing her how to craft things that the weavers of Deepnest could hardly dream of creating.

Her clawtips clicked against cool, hard porcelain, and, as soon as she verified she had a good grip on it, she jerked it out. Hollow shivered all over, the membrane half-drawn over their eye working as a fresh gush of void spilled out over the edge of their mask, but they still didn’t move as she washed the shard in the spring and fit it back into their face, satisfied with herself. 

“All done. Heal again, you should be able to see now.” This time, she didn’t move away as they focused, trusting their control over their abilities. The soul swirling around them bound their mask together with a flash, though the crack still lingered, and when they tipped their head back to look at her, they didn’t have to angle it a weird way to look at her. Void briefly flickered and feathered out from their eye sockets, clearing the trails of black still stuck to their face, making them look nearly whole again.

And then they bent down and pressed their chin to the top of her head, nuzzling gently between her horns. She sucked in a breath, tensing at the surprise contact, but no- they were just thanking her, grateful to her for everything that she’d done. She didn’t need to come after them. She didn’t need to help them, she could have just left them to die. But she didn’t. She didn’t, and there was a cold, heavy weight in her chest that wasn’t hers, and a strange warm thing that felt like pride- pride in her accomplishments, in her capability, in her growing up. They had missed her. They had missed her, and they were tired and everything hurt in a way that they couldn’t put words to, a shame dragging at every inch of their being for daring to be the one vessel alive that was still breathing, the one vessel who had failed everyone and still dared to feel, to be broken. But despite everything, they were proud of her. 

She closed her eyes, breath hitching, and rested her foreclaws on their arms, her left hand still flecked with void. She couldn’t hug them, not with so much of their shell so exposed and vulnerable, and for some reason, that didn’t feel right. Little Ghost was gone. All of the others were gone, too, as was her mother and father both, all of them dead with the banishing of the Old Light. The two of them were orphans now, and she couldn’t even hug her sibling properly. 

_I missed you. Don't leave me alone again._

A whistling huff, a puff of cold air against her horns, and Hollow gently shrugged her claws off their arms, shifting over closer so that they could nudge their head over her shoulder in an approximation of a hug. Still not quite there, still an action that brought shame to them in ways they couldn’t express. But worth it, for the little sister who had grown so much. 

After years of being alone, all their love was overbearing. Hornet took a deep, shuddering breath, shoved her forehead into an unharmed part of their thorax, and finally let her tears fall.

**Author's Note:**

> Pls excuse any grammar errors I couldn't fuckin keep this monster in check anymore, much less proofread it more than thrice
> 
> I prescribe heavily to the theory that Hollow and Hornet knew each other when Hornet was little for multiple in-game reasons, but then I went overboard with it and decided to headcanon that Hollow was Hornet's personal guard and makeshift minder when she was really little bc the Pale King had no idea how to handle her. They looked just like her and had this cool void aura that would make her sleepy and calm, so he just threw up his many hands, went 'fuck it', and assigned them to help care for her when Mamma Herrah was busy terrorizing the nobles. Hollow fucking a d o r e d her, so it worked out, but as she got older and started to understand what was going on, she got told that her playmate/watcher/sibling was basically an emotionless automaton who never loved her. Which sucked ass and clearly wasn't true, but it helped her accept her sealing a little bit and test the vessels for worthiness, at least. Still fucked her up though.
> 
> Her love for tinkering and ability to deaden her voice of all emotion def. came from the Pale King, though. She may like her mother more, and have her temper/disposition, but she takes after her dad in mind. There's no other explanation for the buzzsaws she used in the Silksong teasers


End file.
